The present invention relates to medical devices for interventional cardiology and radiology.
Various procedures, such as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures, involve navigating a guidewire along a convoluted intravascular access path and, in some cases, crossing a lesion or other obstacle with the guidewire. The different stages of guidewire deployment in such cases have differing requirements for guidewire tip curvature and guidewire stiffness.
Certain guidewires have capabilities for adjusting tip curvature. Others have capabilities for varying tip stiffness. However, existing adjustable guidewires typically only have the ability to vary one of these two parameters, or have a fixed correlation between them.
It would be advantageous to provide a guidewire in which the stiffness and tip curvature can be modified in an independent, or near-independent manner.